Let’s get cooking wow, lugaw!
Damp weather calls for a bowl of something hot to eat. This is true, perhaps, anywhere in the world, whether in the cold Western regions or in a tropical country like the Philippines. There are various hot soups that Filipinos are fond of, mostly with meat, chicken or fish as main ingredient.
In the countryside, chickens – especially freerange chickens – and fish are easy to come by. Only that fish become scarce during the rainy season, because few fishermen would dare the strong winds and the rough seas. Meats are not as common in the rural areas the way it is in the city markets. Many homes opt for vegetable soup, or “utan” as Visayans would call it. Their reason for the choice is either economic or health. “Utan” is good to go with cooked corn grits instead of rice. Corn grits is also a bit cheaper compared to rice, and supposedly healthier. But if people want something hot for a quick meal, they would have both soup and rice in one dish – the Asian-style rice porridge, known in Pilipino as “lugaw.” Used to be regarded as a poor man’s meal, “lugaw” has since been served at posh city restaurants, referred to as congee. Well, it still remains a staple of feeding programs in depressed communities.
The difference between the “lugaw” of the poor and that of the rich are the various other basic ingredients added. For the affluent, the porridge may come with several choices of flavorings: chicken, duck, meatballs, sliced fish, pork, pork liver, and giblets. There is also a delectable practice among the local Chinese community of using meat or fish floss as topping to the basic “lugaw.”
Those that cannot afford to add ‘frills’ to the “lugaw” are okay to just add salt. But, hey, there’s actually a middle ground. There’s “lugaw” that resembles neither gourmet nor poverty. An example is a “lugaw” recipe that’s known in the Visayas and Mindanao as “pospas.”